Chapter 16
Sixteen
brOOKS
Sam’s question stays with me long after she walks away.
Not the part about fear, though God knows that one's sticking, too. Not the part about another pregnancy someday, which scares the hell out of me and makes me stupidly hopeful all at once.
It’s the bracelet.
Do you get angry again and remove another bracelet I've given you to punish me?
The words hit me too late.
At the time, there was just too much to sort through. Tony’s confession. Luci’s part in it. Sam’s face when I admitted I’d wanted to hurt her at the clinic. Her voice when she said I broke her heart. All of it came at once, too fast and too sharp for one man to sort through while standing still.
But now I’m sitting in my truck outside The Funnel Cloud with my hand wrapped around the steering wheel, and all I can think is that Sam believed I took off that bracelet to punish her.
I look toward the bar.
Through the front windows, I can see movement. Petra behind the bar. A lineman carrying a stack of folded tarps. A few locals sitting close together with paper plates and plastic cups. The town is still bruised from the storm, but it’s up and moving.
Sam is in there somewhere.
I don’t go back in.
I don’t text her. I don’t call. I don’t tell her where I’m going, because this isn’t something I’m doing to make her look at me.
The engine turns over with a rough rumble. My left arm protests when I shift into reverse, the healing injury pulling tight beneath my sleeve.
I drive.
The roads out of Muncie are still littered in places.
Broken branches shoved to the shoulder. A stop sign bent almost flat.
A strip of sheet metal caught in a barbed-wire fence, flashing dull silver when my headlights hit it.
The sky over the Panhandle is clear tonight, all that violence gone somewhere else, leaving regular people to clean up after it.
I’ve made a career out of chasing storms. Naming them, tracking them, getting close enough for the footage, the science, and the rush.
The storm that did the worst damage to my life never had a name.
By the time I pull into our driveway, my back is stiff and my eyes burn from the drive. The house sits dark except for the motion light over the garage. It snaps on when I step out, bright and accusing.
Sam always hated that light. Said it made her feel like she was about to be told to put her hands up and the cops were going to come out of the bushes.
The memory almost makes me smile. Almost.
I unlock the side door and step into the mudroom. My boots sound too loud on the tile. Her old rain jacket still hangs on the hook beside mine, the sleeves limp.
The house smells closed up. Dust, faint lemon from the cleaner she liked, the stale ghost of coffee. No television murmuring from the living room. No Sam calling from the bedroom to ask if I can grab the towels out of the dryer. No light over the kitchen sink where she left it on.
I stand in the mudroom too long.
Then I make myself move.
The kitchen is clean. The housekeeper has a key, so I suspect she came in and swept whatever remained of the evidence of our life as it was. I'm not sure whether I should be grateful or sad about that.
I pass the living room, then stop.
There’s a framed photo on the console table.
Me and Sam in front of the old blue truck, sunburned and windblown, both of us grinning like we’d just stolen something.
Hershel took it after a chase that gave us terrible footage and one of the best days of my life.
Sam’s arm is around my waist. Mine is hooked around her shoulders.
On my wrist, bright against my tanned skin, is the bracelet.
Brown leather. Small silver clasp. Nothing fancy.
She gave it to me for my birthday not long after we started dating, back when a decent motel room felt like luxury and dinner somewhere with actual plates counted as a celebration.
I remember her sitting across from me in a booth at The Funnel Cloud, cheeks pink, trying to act like she wasn’t nervous.
“It’s not much,” she said, sliding the little box across the table.
I opened it and found the bracelet coiled inside.
She shrugged before I could say anything. “Something to keep me with you.”
I put it on right there.
I wore it through storms, meetings, interviews, truck repairs, sponsor dinners, cheap motels, our wedding reception, and the first ultrasound appointment where I stared at a grainy screen and knew my life would never be the same. I just didn't know how then.
Then the accident happened.
I climb the stairs before I can lose my nerve.
Our bedroom door is open. I reach for the light, then stop myself.
The moon gives me enough to see by. The bed is made, another piece of evidence that the housekeeper has been here.
Sam’s side is neat. Pillow in place. The paperback she’d been reading still on the nightstand with a receipt tucked inside as a bookmark.
The dresser drawer sticks when I pull it open. It always has. I told Sam I’d fix it. Add it to the long list of things I meant to do and didn’t.
In the back, beneath a stack of old bandanas and a watch I stopped wearing because the battery died, is a small metal tin.
My fingers go numb before I even open it.
For one second, I think about closing the drawer.
I think about driving back to Muncie. I think about leaving the tin exactly where it is, letting the drawer swallow it again.
Then Sam’s voice cuts through me.
Do we lose another two years because you don’t know how to be afraid without making me pay for it?
I take out the tin.
The bracelet is inside, coiled around itself. Clean now. I cleaned it after the hospital. Sat at the kitchen table with shaking hands and a damp cloth, wiping leather that should never have held my wife’s blood.
For months afterward, I couldn’t look at it.
I couldn’t look at my wrist without seeing Sam in the back seat of Hershel’s truck, her face gray, her fingers slipping in mine.
The road slick with red mud. The scream of metal.
Her hand pressed to her belly. My voice telling her to stay with me, over and over, like I could keep her here through sheer volume.
I pick up the bracelet.
The leather is softer than I expect. Warmer than it should be. My thumb finds the worn place near the clasp where I used to rub it when I was thinking.
My stomach turns.
For a second, I’m not in our bedroom.
I’m standing at the edge of a lake two months after the accident, the bracelet clenched in my fist so tight the clasp dug into my palm. Hershel was waiting by the truck, pretending he didn’t know what I was there to do. The water was dark. The wind smelled like wet grass.
I raised my arm.
I couldn’t let go.
Because it wasn’t only blood.
It was Sam’s shy smile in that booth. It was her saying, Something to keep me with you. It was her fingers fastening it around my wrist because I kept fumbling the clasp on purpose so she’d lean closer. It was her laughing when I told her I was never taking it off unless I lost the whole damn arm.
So I didn’t throw it.
I came home and put it in this tin.
Then I let Sam believe whatever explanation hurt her most, because I never gave her the truth.
My hand shakes as I turn the bracelet over.
I want there to be a lightning strike of a moment. Some kind of hard line between the man who took it off and the man standing here now. There isn’t. There’s only me in a dark bedroom with my wife’s side of the bed empty and a piece of leather in my hand.
I sit on the edge of the mattress.
The clasp is small. Stubborn. My left hand doesn’t want to cooperate, and my right is shaking too badly to be useful.
“Come on,” I mutter.
The sound of my own voice in the room makes my throat tighten.
I try again.
This time, the clasp catches.
The bracelet settles around my wrist.
I close my eyes.
The first image comes fast. Sam’s blood on the leather. Dark and drying. My hands slick. The hospital lights. A doctor’s voice saying something that would make Sam sob.
I breathe through my teeth.
The mattress dips beneath my weight. Somewhere in the house, the air conditioner kicks on with a low hum. The room is cool. The bracelet is snug against my skin. I'm here, not there.
Another image comes.
Sam at twenty-two, leaning over the table at The Funnel Cloud, trying not to watch my face too closely when I opened the box.
Then Sam in the passenger seat, boot braced on the dash, telling me I was about to miss the best road option in the county because I was too busy admiring my own driving.
Then Sam in bed beside me at one in the morning, stealing the blanket and denying it while half asleep.
Then Sam this afternoon, standing in front of me with her bare hand and her steady voice, asking what happens the next time I’m afraid.
I open my eyes.
The bracelet is still there.
Nothing breaks. Nothing heals all at once either.
I sit there until my breathing steadies.
I sleep in our bed because I’m too tired to do anything else.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
The truth is uglier. I sleep there because the sheets still hold the faintest trace of Sam’s shampoo, and I am apparently not above letting that wreck me in private.
I wake before sunrise reaching for her.
My hand slides across cool cotton and finds nothing.
For one stupid second, my body hasn’t caught up. It expects warmth. Her shoulder. Her hair tickling my arm. The grumble she makes when my alarm goes off too early, followed by the way she always ends up curling closer even while complaining.
Then the room comes into focus.
Empty pillow.
Quiet house.
Bracelet tight around my wrist.
I lie there with my hand on her side of the bed and let the truth settle its full weight on my chest.
She may never sleep here again.
She may never come through the mudroom kicking off wet boots. May never stand in this bathroom brushing her teeth while glaring at some weather model on her phone. May never sit cross-legged on this bed brushing her hair out and making jokes about how I primp too much after a shower.
She may stay in Muncie.
She may build something there that has nothing to do with Storm Posse. Emergency preparedness. Response systems. Sirens that work when people need them. Something that makes people look at her and say her name without attaching mine to it first.
She may move farther than that.
Two thousand miles. Another state. Another life.
Someday, some other man might know which side of the bed she takes. Some other man might hear her laugh in a kitchen I’ve never stood in. Some other man might get to put his hand at the small of her back because she chose him, and I’ll have no right to hate him for being chosen.
My hand closes around the sheet.
The pain is so sharp I have to sit up.
The old part of me wants to do something. Make a plan. Find the road that gets me around the damage. Call her, show up, explain better, give more, fix more. Push hard enough and maybe the future bends back into the shape I want.
That’s the part of me that cost her two years.
I swing my feet to the floor.
Sunlight is starting to thin the darkness around the curtains. The room looks ordinary in it. Dust on the dresser. A laundry basket in the corner. The tin still open beside me with nothing inside it now.
Sam’s life does not exist to keep me from hurting.
It's the truth, but I'd be lying if I said I liked it.
There’s nothing noble about it. Nothing peaceful. It feels like standing still while the sky turns green and every instinct in my body screams at me to move.
But if Sam decides the happiest version of her life is one where I’m not standing beside her, then I have to live with that.
I can hurt.
I can miss her until suddenly I waste away from the lack of her.
I can love her for the rest of my life.
But I don’t get to turn that love into a rope around her wrist.
I stand and go to the dresser mirror.
The man looking back at me is rougher than the one Sam married. More lines around the eyes. Split lip still healing. Stubble gone uneven because I’ve been doing a sorry job with razors lately. My shirt is wrinkled from sleeping in it.
On my wrist, the bracelet sits where it used to.
For a second, I see the blood again.
Then I see Sam’s fingers fastening the clasp. Sam laughing into her beer because I held my wrist up like she’d given me a Rolex. Sam telling me not to get too full of myself because leather was cheaper than diamonds.
I press my thumb to the worn place near the clasp.
The worst day of our lives took our baby.
It took pieces of Sam I didn’t know how to protect.
It took the man I thought I was and left a coward in his place.
And then I let it take more.
I fasten my watch on the other wrist. Grab my keys from the nightstand. Then I pause.
Sam’s paperback is still there.
I straighten it without moving the receipt from its place.
Downstairs, the house is quiet. I lock the door behind me and step into the morning.
I don’t know if Sam will ever notice the bracelet.
For the first time, that isn’t the point.